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Let's Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell

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Let's Take the Long Way Home

A Memoir of Friendship

by Gail Caldwell

Narrator Joyce Bean

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Length 4 hours 38 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Before there was Mary Karr (Liar’s Club) or Jeanette Walls (The Glass Castle), there was Caroline Knapp, memoirist and pioneer of writing about truth and pain. Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, published in the early 1990’s, is a quietly moving story chronicling her harrowing relationship with alcohol. A few years after the book’s publication, Knapp and Gail Caldwell became best friends. Both writers, the two met for years to walk their dogs along a favorite path; their accumulative miles eventually logging a measure for the interior ground they covered. They spoke about everything from their shared history of struggle, to their relationships, to their love of writing books. When Knapp was diagnosed with cancer these two private, fiercely self-reliant women were suddenly thrown into the unknown. Caldwell chronicles this journey in her own memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home (now available in paperback). Caldwell’s striking and beautiful prose speaks to the deepest levels of devotion and grief and to the transformation and treasures she found in knowing and then losing Caroline. This book is not only a gift to Ms. Knapp, but it is a gift to anyone who is lucky enough to have found and journeyed through life with that singular and treasured relationship of a best friend.”
— SMC • Bookshop Santa Cruz

Summary

In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize—winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story.

In her younger years, Caldwell defined herself by rebellion and independence, a passion for books, and an aversion to intimacy and a distrust of others. Then, while living in Cambridge in her early forties, Caldwell adopted a rambunctious puppy named Clementine. On one of their bucolic walks, she met Caroline and her dog, Lucille, and both women's lives changed forever.

Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected, a friendship that will thrive on their shared secrets, including parallel struggles with alcoholism and loneliness. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.

In her signature exquisite prose, Caldwell mines the deepest levels of devotion and grief in this wise and affecting account about losing her best friend. Let's Take the Long Way Home is also a celebration of life and all the little moments worth cherishing—and affirms why Gail Caldwell is rightly praised as one of our bravest and most honest literary voices.

Biography & Memoir Family & Relationships Nonfiction